Hanover-Bates Case

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help him to avoid poor performance.

2. Jim need to work hard to win other staff’s respect because of his newly appointed. The existing staff is unfamiliar with him, and they may not fully recognize Jim’s ability straight away.

3. Jim should improve his communicate skills with others. A sales manager cannot work alone（Roles and Responsibilities of a Sales Manage，2016）.Jim need to impose his teamwork.

c. What comments and recommendations could be made regarding his appointment in relation to the senior sales manager and organisational elements?

1. Regarding the comments and recommendations, Jim must be aware of his is a newcomer for this position. And if he wants the existing staff to carry out his new plan, he must focus on analyzing of the data and provide strongly figures to support him.

2. He should apologize to Carver. Carver is an experienced sales representative and there is no denying that an experienced salespeople is kind of value for company’s organization. If Carver quit and work for the competitor, he will take lots of his customers and this will have a negative impact on our company’ sales.

3. As a sale manager, he should delegate the duties of each salespeople. Considering Carver’s experience, Jim can draw him in his side as an opinion leader instead push him out. For example, giving Carver a more important position as a mentor which takes changer of training. This way District 3 would avoid a replacement problem in the future.     

Question3:

Suggest what should have been the actions / strategies undertaken by Jim Sprague on assuming the role as sales manager.

a. Using references and data from the case, your answer to Q2, as well as your findings in Q1, to strongly support your answer.

 There are three actions:

1. As for the important cause for District 3 ‘s the worst profit performance was high selling expense. In the CASE EXHIBIT 5-3, comparing to District 2&4 which both have the same sale reps (6), the sales reps’ salaries expense is clearly higher than the other districts. And also the personal selling expense is one of highest in the company. Jim can implement a supervision system to monitor each sales reps’ expense. This will improve the sale manager to allocate district’s resources and increase the sale reps’ contribution.

2. He could take an introduction of the bottom-up to forecast the sales quota. For instance, Jim can divide the salespeople into several sales team, and each team ought to get their own performance records and then he can get the valid data from these records and also can help to fix the selling tasks such as sales quota. And this system will improve employee attitude because they participate in it and can realize the value in the company. They can realize he setting of sales quota and profit quota is reasonable and they can meet this goal as well.

3. As shown in the Appendix three, District 3 is effectiveness but not efficiency, they spend too much energies and time on potential account and ACCOUNT C which is small accounts, generating $9,000 or less in sales. They can refocus the account coverage, spend more time on the high margin account (ACCOUNT A &B) instead of meeting quotas. According to the model of enhanced framework of B2B selling process (Wilkinson 2004), the salespeople should be training on telemarking and professional selling skills. After that, the district 3 could be more efficiency.

4. As figure shown in the Appendix Two, the motivation for sales reps on making profit is negative. In order to solve this situation, Jim could change the compensation plan which could reward the salespeople strictly on the basis of profit, such as they can receive commissions of 0.5 percent of profit. With this plan, the staff could be incentive to the profit not only focus on the sales volume.

Question 4:

Examine what other options were available for Hanover Bates in relation to choice of sales manager.

The other option on choice of sales manager is giving the position to Hank Carver. We can consider this situation in both positive and negative.

Positive:

1. Carver has 34 years of experience in the sales field and has an intimate knowledge of company’s organizational culture. Based on these factors, he can be an ideal candidate for this position of sale manager (Hair et al. 2009).

2. If Carver becomes the sale manager, the existing staff will work hard with him. Because the staff knows Carver’s dedication deserved award.

3. If Carver has been promoted, these will encourage the other staff to work hard. They will be aware of opportunities for advancement is equal to everyone.

 Negatives:

1. Compare with Jim’s understands in the roles of a sale manager, Carver will pay more attention on sales rather than management. Therefore, he may not realize the current performance is poorly and still operating the old system. This would bring a negative in company’s long-term.  

2. Carver was nearly retirement. And after his retirement, the company would face the problem again. This is not efficiency.

3. When Carver become a sale manager, he cannot only put all his time and energies on his customers. Hence, there is a new staff to take over Carver’s accounts. This staff is unfamiliar to the old customers which will hurt the company’s customer relationships, and the worst situation is customer switch and never to return.

References:

Babakus E, Cravens DW, Grant K, Ingram TN & LaForge RW 1996, ‘Investigating the relationship among sales, management control, sales territory design, salesperson performance, and sales organization effectiveness’, International Journal of Research in Marketing, Vol. 13, pp345-363.

Erin Anderson and Richard L. Oliver, 1987, Perspectives on Behavior-Based versus Outcome-Based Salesforce Control Systems, Journal of Marketing, Vol. 51, No. 4, pp. 76-88.

Hair, JF, Anderson, RE, Mehta R & Babin, BJ 2009, Sales Management: building customer relationships and partnerships, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, MA

Roles and Responsibilities of a Sales Manager, 2016, Management Study Guide, viewed 6 March 2016, < http://www.managementstudyguide.com/roles-responsibilities-of-sales-manager.htm>

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